Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni
by Abused Wide Bellatris
Summary: Death Eaters create a bloodbath in a muggle shopping center in 1977: The first is a sadist with a paintbrush, the second a capricious sociopath, the third a feral lunatic, and the last an enforcer of terror. Features Mulciber, Avery, Rosier, and Wilkes.
1. The Arrival

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**Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni**

_just another dead reptile_**  
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><p><strong>The Cast...<br>**

RUIN... Mulciber  
>HATE... Avery<br>MADNESS... Evan Rosier  
>OPPRESSION... Wilkes<p>

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><p><strong>The Arrival<strong>

Four ominous jets of thick black smoke rocket past the storefronts of a crowded London shopping center, all aiming to converge at the same point. Many people stop to watch, wondering if it's some kind of very strange lights show - while a small handful recognize with jolts of horror what is about to happen.

Just before they meet in the middle of the most heavily trafficked part of the building, the inky torpedoes suddenly drop and collide with the ground. The billowing smoke becomes four people, dressed all in black from head to toe - black masks, black cloaks, black robes, black gloves, boots, _everything_. No one moves or speaks for a moment. The curious crowd, whose instinct to panic has not fully set in yet, regards the four strangers:

The first is a man with dark, malevolent eyes and muscles that bulge even under his cloak.

The second speaks to the first in a woman's voice, one that's full of hatred, saying something about 'filthy muggles'.

The third is _very_ tall and has a strange symbol painted in gold on his forehead. He stares silently with hypnotic pale-blue eyes.

The fourth, and also the shortest, has a more refined, aristocratic posture and a slightly more detached look than the others.

Silence.

Then the colored lights start flying, and the screaming starts. Blood slicks the floor, enough that a girl slips and is trampled by the crowd of people trying to get out of the way. There are blinding flashes of a sickly green light and a rushing sound, and each time someone falls and doesn't get up again. A red electric-like tendril explodes from a wand, connects to an old man, and he begins screaming as if knives are being pushed through every inch of his body. Something explodes, violently, eliciting cheers and congratulations among the assailants as a portion of the ceiling caves in.

The scene has, in moments, descended into absolute chaos; people are trampling each other, shoving each other out of the way, parents are abandoning their children, lovers leaving each other to die. An armed guard rushes to the rescue, but before he can even take aim he's vomiting black blood under a large potted plant, his weapon forgotten, while the attackers split up.

The malevolent man wanders off on his own, blasting apart everything he lays eyes upon, collapsing entire stores onto those taking refuge inside.

The hateful woman heads in the opposite direction, dragging people - particularly children - out of their hiding places to detonate their bellies or melt their faces off.

The tall man drifts away like a will-o-the-wisp, leaving an unpredictable and utterly obscene trail of death in his wake.

The shorter man has already disappeared from view, but he's still around: in the very eye of the storm, a glassy-eyed mother is strangling her five-year-old son while the outline of a man watches.

The banners of the King of Hell advance.

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><p><em>Review, please. <em>

__Lord Voldemort would probably not take too kindly to his Death Eaters wearing their uniforms when they're not on official missions for him. Hence, the black hoods instead of white masks. The title of this story is a Latin phrase. It means something like (my Latin is not very good, sorry) "The Banners of the King of Hell Advance", the last line of the chapter. And as for the cast... you'll meet them soon enough. Update comes in three days.  
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	2. Ruin

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**Ruin**

There are muggles hiding under the tables in the food court when Mulciber walks in. He knows they're there - but he can't see most of them, so he walks around blowing up tables at random and laughing whenever someone cries out in agony.

Alan Mulciber is the picture of a low-ranking Death Eater. He's got wild shoulder-length black hair - unseen beneath his executioner's mask - rippling muscles, and he's full of cruel, malicious laughter. People see him, people hear him, and people know he means business.

He points his wand lazily at a children's restaurant, in the general direction of the silly, grinning hamburger-headed mascot drawn on the front. An overpowered _Incendio_ later, flames and plumes of black smoke are billowing from the windows.

Some muggles stumble out, transformed into blazing human torches.

Two groping, flaming little children blunder into each other and collapse.

He'll have to show that to Avery in a pensieve later.

He blows up another table.

Somebody screams in terror.

Beneath his wand, a girl pleads hysterically for her life, begs not to be killed.

He tells her politely to stop her bitching and blasts a hole the size of a bludger in her stomach.

Out of all his classes, he dislikes Herbology the most. Everything in it has to do with creating and sustaining life. Mulciber's idea of beauty is taking something good and whole, and defiling it. Ruining it. Seeing things burning and falling apart, corpses rotting, souls torn apart in their prime...

Mulciber stalks up to an injured woman with a young child at her side and casts the Cruciatus Curse on her almost as soon as he lays eyes on her. Her shattered legs spray blood everywhere as she convulses and screams, eyes bulging like they're about to pop from her head - but her son's wails are louder and more piercing; he clearly doesn't understand what's going on at all, too young - or too dense, maybe - to comprehend any of it.

Mulciber kicks the kid hard in the ribs and then stomps on his face until it caves in, laughing at the dying woman's wretched cries.

He's a sadist.

He likes causing pain.

But that's not what he truly loves about all this.

It's the corruption, and the chaos, and the destruction that he truly relishes. Mulciber is a terrorist without a cause: he may be a Death Eater, but he doesn't particularly care about blood, heritage, putting muggles in their place, or any of that rubbish. No, it's the desecration - the ruin; that's all that matters, that and the art he creates from it. For him, ruin is the very highest form of art.

And art is the _proper_ task of life.

A couple of very foolish young teenagers try to ambush him from behind an overturned table.

He Stuns all of them. Lazily twirling his wand between his fingers, he considers what to do with them.

They are a gift, he decides, a gift which he shall use to create a masterpiece to present to the world. It'll be repulsive to most people because they just don't understand it - but it just wouldn't be worth it if they did.

Mulciber levitates the muggles up to the ceiling, one by one, and electrical wires impale their hands. Then he Enervates them and fires Entrail-Expelling Curses at them all, and they writhe and scream terribly in the air, held up and electrocuted by the wires that are twisted through them while their intestines snake around their bodies.

But Mulciber won't let them die yet. Not yet.

He conjures a camera and takes a picture of the electrocuted, eviscerated muggles screaming their lungs out.

For himself.

For his friends.

For the Daily Prophet when he anonymously sends it to them so they can put it on the front page of tomorrow's issue.

He's a masterpiece unto himself.

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><p><em>Review, please.<em>

__It was hard to write Mulciber as an 'artistic sadist', rather than a Complete Monster. He's is_ in the same league of weird as a guy who piles dead flies on top of each other, photographs it, and then shows it at an art gallery.__ Mulciber's first name is never stated in the books, so 'Alan' isn't canon, obviously. It isn't completely random, though: __'Alan' comes from 'Alath', which is derived from the biblical town of 'Baalath'__. Mulciber was a character in Milton's _Paradise Lost_, a fallen angel, so it's kind of fitting. The line in the chapter about art being "the proper task of life" is a Nietzsche quote. Update comes in three days._


	3. Hate

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**Hate**

On the side of the shopping complex directly opposite where Mulciber is, Morgan Avery draws her wand sideways, bisecting a couple and beheading their young daughter. The two muggles take a moment to die, and they scream for their dead daughter in their delirious state. She steps over their wailing torsos, laughing at them, and heads 'downtown' to a maternity clothing store.

Avery hates all muggles, but she _hates_ muggles who are parents. And she _hates _muggles who are children.

A group of five or six people tries to run from a store on one side to a store on the other... right in front of her - stupid. Avery hits one with an Entrail-Expelling Curse, and her guts boil out all over her comrades, soaking them with her blood and intestinal juice and shit. They stop to help her - stupid - and Avery just stands there and blasts the whole group with a jet of acid.

They actually manage to get away, leaving a trail of sloughed-off paste in their wake. If they survive and find a hospital, though, they'll never be anything more than featureless lumps of melted skin with internal organs.

She laughs, imagining the result in her mind, and goes into the maternity store.

A very obese woman - but not pregnant, sadly - tries to stop her. Avery uses the Entrail-Expeller on her, too, just because she's so _fucking_ fat. Avery isn't fat, or ugly, or skinny, or beautiful, or_ anything_. She's just Avery. Which she hates. Like almost everything else.

Avery's full of hate.

Hate breeds strength.

Avery wants to be strong.

She sees a pregnant woman cowering by a rack of clothes, grins wolfishly, and fires the Killing Curse right into her swollen belly. That, Avery thinks as she moves on, looking for another target, is something for the Unspeakables to dissect: did the baby die from the _Avada Kedavra _itself or did it die because the mother died? She decides to ask Rosier about it later. He knows all kinds of weird shit like that, and besides, he wants to be an Unspeakable.

Avery wants to be an Auror.

People would respect her if she was an Auror.

They should respect her _now_.

There's a woman in the changing rooms. She's pregnant too, but not far along. Not far along at all; in fact, she's so not-far-along that she's still very pretty, and Avery feels a tug of attraction toward her when she first sees her.

This just makes her even angrier, because she _hates_ people who are pretty.

They're always prettier than her.

Avery is plain and boring, no matter how much makeup she wears.

So she hits the woman with a Body Bind and beats her until she's not pretty anymore. And when she's done with that, she kicks her in the stomach as hard as she can. She tells the woman she hopes it lives to be retarded.

Then she Apparates the bleeding woman to a cemetery and dumps her there, laughing.

It isn't enough.

When Avery Apparates back, she sets the whole store on fire and watches it burn. She's very good with Fiendfyre, so good she can direct the serpents to let people run out of the store and then snatch them up when they think they're going to make it to safety. It still isn't good enough; she walks around to the neighboring stores, shooting jets of burning petrol into them until muggles come running out, and then she hits them with whatever Dark spells come to mind - Blood-Boilers, Nightmare Curses, Entrail-Expellers, _Abrumpo, Ruptura, Crucio, Avada Kedavra..._

Avery hates muggles.

Avery hates children.

Avery hates their parents.

Avery Morgan's muggle parents always liked their _normal_ children so much more than her.

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><p><em>Review, please.<em>

_Avery is male in canon, but fuck canon. Harry never saw Avery's face as far as I remember, and some Death Eaters could have used charms to alter their voices. The fact that Morgan Avery/Avery Morgan can reasonably pretend to be an extended member of an old pureblood family (the Averys) with a common wizarding first name (Morgan, after Morgan Le Fey) just by rearranging her names is extremely fortunate for a Slytherin with her blood status. As for Avery herself... well, t_his part got an enormous amount of material cut to make it of equal length to the others; most notably, Avery stabs a man's eye out with her wand in the original version. She's really messed up, isn't she? But _wait 'till you meet Evan Rosier..._  
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	4. Madness

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**Madness**

Evan Rosier wanders into a movie theater. He walks right past the ticket taker, not noticing him until the teenaged boy tries to stop him from going in without a ticket. For a long time, Rosier just stares at him, regarding him silently with his head turned to the side a little bit. Then he says the words, and a jet of green light leaps from his wand and the muggle is dead.

What a waste of life.

He hums a little.

Wit beyond measure...

The muggles selling refreshments don't make the same mistake when Rosier comes over and takes some muggle candy to eat later. He kills them anyway because one of them looks a bit like Rita Skeeter, and that reminds him of how during fourth year Rita invited him to Lestrange's Christmas ball and interviewed him there and then wrote an article saying he was crazy and sent it to his parents and they used the Cruciatus on him for being an embarrassment to the family - and anyway the muggles would _also_ have locked him in broom cupboards and hidden his things and stuck him to the ceiling if he'd gone to school with_ them _so it's only fair...

He kills some people coming out of the theater, too, just _because_.

But he doesn't kill the usher hiding behind the concession stand with his hands raised in surrender, because the usher reminds him of Wilkes, and Wilkes is nice to him.

He chooses a door at random - _eeny, meeny, miny, moe _- and goes through it. It's a movie called 'Pete's Dragon'. The bright colors make his eyes hurt. Rosier lets the door slam behind him and yells very loudly ('hey everybody!'), attracting some attention. People stare at him, which he's used to so it doesn't bother him all that much. He just stares back.

Someone is standing in front of him.

It's a child. A little boy.

There is fear in his eyes.

There is fear in everyone's eyes.

Everyone's afraid.

They're all afraid. Of him. They should be.

Evan Rosier is a fearsome sight: nearly six foot four, rail-thin, bearing the symbol of the Deathly Hallows in gold paint on the forehead of his black mask; everything is black except for two very pale, very wide blue eyes that never blink. But now everything will be red. He lifts his wand into the air, and people begin to die.

A kind of buzzing noise has filled his ears, blocking out the screaming. Rosier hums loudly while he kills people, trying to match the pitch with his voice, but it keeps changing every time he gets close. It's very frustrating.

There's blood everywhere. The child Rosier locked eyes with when he came into the theater is screaming in agony as his blood boils in his veins. His parents - Rosier thinks they were his parents, anyway - are dead, one mostly decapitated (everything above the mouth) and the other partially melted. The smell of death is all around, thick and heavy and suffocating.

Everywhere, there are blank, empty eyes staring at him. He stares back, still humming.

They're dead.

Everyone's dead.

There's a sea of dead people in front of him.

...and now none of these people can ever steal his things or stick him to the ceiling or lock him in a broom cupboard for a week or invite him to Lestrange's Christmas ball so they can interview him to write nasty articles about how crazy he is for believing in nargles and wrackspurts and heliopaths and stick them in the school paper and send copies home to his parents and get him _Crucio_ed for embarrassing the family like Rita Skeeter did in his fourth year...

When he's done, covered in the blood of children, Evan Rosier sits in the theater and watches some of the film.

It's terrible.

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><p><em>Review, please.<em>

_Rosier was the most fun to write. He's like a demented, evil, male version of Luna Lovegood that got _Crucio_ed a few too many times. As for why he believes in the same creatures as the Lovegoods, maybe he hung out with Xeno too much. Or Xeno hung out with him too much... You will meet Wilkes in three days. He's not as batshit crazy as Rosier, but that's not necessarily a good thing (for the victims) when we're talking about mass murderers, is it?  
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	5. Oppression

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**Oppression**

Green light fells another fleeing muggle. They can't get away from him, not really: Wilkes has put up wards at the exits that instill in anyone who crosses them a sudden desire to turn around and run back in the direction they came from.

He's a Death Eater because he _believes_ in the Dark Lord's cause.

Muggles should be controlled.

They should _fear_.

The Killing Curse leaps from his wand again, striking down a man who's running towards him, slobbering like a rabid dog. Wilkes pauses for a moment, feeling dizzy as the magical backwash of the curse rushes over him, and then resumes his stride past the entrances of the stores once the unpleasant sensation wears off.

Wilkes was raised to be a politician. He loathes the very idea. He wants to be the Seeker for Pride of Portree.

But he also knows what his duty as a Death Eater is, and _he will do it_.

Even when the Mark isn't burning.

He steps into a muggle sporting goods shop. A _Crucio_ has a woman in pink on the floor, screaming herself hoarse. She convulses under his wand, curls into a fetal-like position with her fingers digging so tightly into her palms that blood dribbles out from under her fingernails.

Wilkes feels little for her, either way. Muggles aren't human, aren't _worth_ sadistic pleasure or moral outrage. It's like stepping on a cockroach.

Letting the curse go, he sweeps out of the sports shop, leaving the woman whimpering and twitching on the floor, where all the other muggles cowering behind sales tables and clothing racks can watch her choke to death on her own bloody vomit.

_Avada Kedavra_. A terrified mother with a baby collapses, spilling it from its carrier.

_Avada Kedavra_. The baby abruptly stops crying.

_Avada Kedavra_. He steps over a lumpy, motionless shape with blond hair.

_Avada Kedavra_. An old man, lying on the floor with a shattered hip or something similar, lets out a barely audible groan as the Killing Curse rips his soul from his mortal body.

Wilkes is a soldier. He doesn't get the same satisfaction from killing the muggles that the others do. He does it because it's necessary. If the muggles don't fear, they will conquer, and then they will oppress. Every flash of green means one less potential dictator, one less potential killer of wizards; every dead child left in the wake of his wand generates fear, uncertainty, unrest, and discord among the muggles; every _Crucio_, every _Avada Kedavra_, every terror raid serves as to condition muggles to fear wizards, to create something so deep it can never be erased, even by a total _Obliviate_.

Muggles in uniforms with guns (Avery told him about these once) appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Security guards or policemen? He can't remember. Whoever they are, they don't know how to use their guns very well, and by the time the safeties are off, Wilkes has Summoned all the air from their lungs. He can hear them gasping, falling to their knees, suffocating to death. He feels nothing for them.

One day, Wilkes will play professional Quidditch for Pride of Portree. But right now, he is a Death Eater and a soldier.

_Avada Kedavra_. Children, parents, adults, the elderly, the sick, the fit, the young, the old, everyone falls beneath Wilkes's wand, their lives torn from them by a sickly green jet of light or a pair of hands belonging to a glassy-eyed family member.

Wilkes knows that his world will be discovered again, eventually.

This time, it will be different...

This time, wizards will not be oppressed, terrorized, and murdered in their beds.

He is doing his part to make sure of that.

_Avada Kedavra._

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

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><p><em>Review, please.<em>

_Wilkes is what Death Eaters should have been in-canon. He's a soldier, not a snooty douchebag like JKR made just about every bad guy who didn't defect.__ I_f you don't think Wilkes is as scary as the other three, go watch Rambo or something, because Wilkes is like an aristocratic, racist version of John Rambo. He uses the Avada Kedavra almost exclusively, but __using the other two Unforgivables in certain situations (like making people strangle each other while Imperiused) would probably drain his magic less._  
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	6. The Disconnect

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**The Disconnect**

At the prickling sensation that signals the falling of the lockout wards, four jets of black smoke converge again at the center of the shopping complex. Aurors pour in through every available entryway; some of the less experienced ones are waylaid by spontaneous illness at the sights they encounter, and one entire battalion finds its way blocked by a blaze of Fiendfyre that's already burned through several stores. The masked assailants gather in a standard Death Eater combat formation, trading spells with the Dark wizard catchers.

The wards that prevent long- (but not short-, or the Aurors would be at a great disadvantage) distance Apparition, which went up the moment the Aurors broke through the Death Eaters' lockout wards, are suddenly torn apart. The Aurors hurry to throw up more wards, but they're too late; the last thing they see is a glimpse of the Death Eaters making obscene gestures at them before all four Disapparate simultaneously.

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><p>Beneath a sweets store called Honeydukes, which is located in the Wizarding village of Hogsmeade, just outside of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, there are four nearly synchronous muffled cracks. A few minutes later, three young wizards and a witch wearing Hogwarts robes slip quietly out of Honeydukes.<p>

The first has dark hair, impressive muscles and a mischievous look in his eyes - although in the right light it could look more malicious than mischievous.

The second, the witch, is an animated but extraordinarily plain brunette whose vocabulary is outstandingly belligerent and combative.

The third is a very tall, very thin young man with stringy red hair, piercing pale blue eyes, and a strange, otherworldly quality to his movements.

The fourth is shorter, with brown hair and a calculating gaze, and a Pride of Portree patch sewn onto the back of his robes.

Mulciber, Avery, Rosier, and Wilkes go to the Three Broomsticks together. Nobody really pays enough attention to them to notice how they're shaking, wired with adrenaline, pupils dilated, still intoxicated with the manic excitement of the previous hour. Nobody realizes they're anything but four ordinary seventh-year students getting smashed together in a pub now that they're of drinking age.

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><p>That night, under the first snowfall of the year, Department of Magical Law Enforcement Head Bartemius Crouch, Sr., gives a press release to an army of reporters outside a cordoned-off, shopping center in London.<p>

Inside, another army, this one comprised of Aurors, tries to piece together the events that took place during a massacre of _horrifying_ proportions.

Many miles away, at the Ministry of Magic, Millicent Bagold prepares to inform the muggle Minister that wizards were responsible for the killing spree.

Deep below, Albus Dumbledore presides over an emergency meeting of the Wizengamot to discuss the problem of muggle-hunting.

In an old house near Little Hangleton, Lord Voldemort hears the news from Yaxley and laughs coldly.

All through London, ordinary people - to whom nothing abnormal ever really happens - answer their doors to find somber-looking policemen on their front step, and soon the sobbing and the tears begin.

And in a village called Hogsmeade, four drunken teenagers wander around in the snow, arm in arm, yelling Hobgoblins songs at the top of their lungs, spilling Firewhiskey onto their robes, and hexing any Gryffindors they come across.

Celebrating victory.

The next day, the first three pages of the Daily Prophet are all taken up by countless articles about muggle-hunting, Death Eaters, Voldemort, Dumbledore, the Ministry, blood-purism, and Dark Wizards. Beneath the headline, which screams about a bloodbath in London, is an enormous, moving photograph of a group of muggles strung up by their hands, convulsing wildly and screaming in an endless loop of agony.

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><p><em>"Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?<em>

_My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone._

_In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape."_

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><p><strong>The End<strong>

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><p><em>Review, please.<em>

_Aurors would probably want to be able to Apparate within a certain area, but not allow their targets to escape. Thus, wards preventing only long-distance Apparition. As for the four Death Eaters: unless I'm mistaken, the Marauders' seventh year was '77-78, and this is set in late '77 (Rosier's movie was released in November) which would make this group only about seventeen. They're actually still quite immature, obviously, but they're already very good at what they do.  
><em>

_For your loyalty in reading this all the way through, I'm going to tell you all about the next story I'm going to post. It's called __"Harry Potter and the Life-Changing Head Injury". Have you ever wondered what might happen if somebody just gave Harry a nice hard whack on the head instead of trying to talk sense into him? This is what might happen. Features Harry Potter with a life-changing, brain-scrambling, horcrux-destroying, inhibition-eliminating frontal lobe lesion.___

_The quote at the end is from the novel version of _American Psycho_.  
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